Making a hugely multi-core CPU that’s ready for gaming is a challenging effort, because most PC games are designed for the typical 4-8 core processor. When greater core counts enter the picture, things can get squirrelly: poor thread scheduling can reduce performance, or (more rarely) the game may simply not run at all. The Threadripper team at AMD spent a long time thinking about how we can help our customers avoid these scenarios altogether, and we call it Game Mode.

Game Mode is a new feature in AMD Ryzen™ Master that reconfigures the platform in two key ways:

It temporarily disables half of the CPU cores, which turns the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X into an 8C16T device (like the AMD Ryzen™ 1800X) and the 1920X into a 6C12T device (like the AMD Ryzen™ 1600X). For the truly technical, this is a 4+4 CCX configuration on one die. This ensures the game encounters the number of cores it was truly designed to handle. Please note that Game Mode does not disable SMT.

We tell the OS to use a Local Mode (NUMA) memory, which keeps a game and its memory footprint inside one CPU die and the locally-connected DRAM. This minimizes several key latency points in the system, which most games love."

Make sure you have Game Mode Disabled in AMD Ryzen™ Master since it disables 8 cores to improve on gaming performance.